


Lose the Person You Have Been

by jax (hippydeath)



Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hippydeath/pseuds/jax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moments in time, on the run from Ozorne. Somehow, it's not quite as frantic as Numair was expecting it to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lose the Person You Have Been

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quasar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quasar/gifts).



He steps off the boat with the clothes on his back, the boots on his feet and a head full of theoretical knowledge. What he doesn’t have is any idea of where he’s going, or how he’s going to get there.  
He doesn’t look too scruffy, and he counts this as a blessing until it starts causing problems when he tries begging for food. He knows that he needs to get away from the port that he landed in, but he’s got no money, and no way, that he can think of, to get any.  
In the end, he takes the risk and uses his Gift to hide himself on a wagon heading out of the port one night. He’s barely had enough sleep or food as it is, and it exhausts him. He dozes off, the magic wearing off and he’s woken when the wagon driver dumps him off the cart in the middle of nowhere, halfway, he thinks between two small towns with little to offer him.  
That was somewhere around the dark hours of the morning, and by the time the sun is finally coming over the horizon, he’s stumbling, half asleep through the gates of one of the towns. The seams on his boots are about to start splitting, and he’s realising that the shirt on his back is not going to be enough to keep him warm over winter.  
He finds somewhere to curl up in a ball and doze until the market starts to get truly noisy, and then he starts to think.  
Apparently now though, he looks scruffy enough to pass for homeless (even though he’s been that for weeks) and a few people toss him bits of food, even a few coins, but they all leave him alone, and he slowly comes to a few uncomfortable realisations.  
Firstly, that he really needs a new name. Arram Draper is not only a pathetic kind of name for a man as powerful as he is, but it’s also one that is going to be hunted until Ozorne is sure that he’s dead. That said, he can’t think of anything off the top of his head, so he ignores that for the time being. No one is asking his name anyway.  
Secondly, using his Gift is a bad idea. Ozorne can probably track it, probably has tracked it already, and no doubt he’s already the target of several well paid, heavily armed and very capable assassins. This poses a problem as without his Gift he is without a means of income, and that leads quite neatly into his third problem.  
He has no money, and it’s getting close to winter. If he could use his Gift there would no doubt be people willing to pay for his services, and if not, then he could probably do something to bulk up his clothes and repair his boots, at least for a while. But as it is, he’s sort of stuck.

 

   
He’s sitting in the market square a week or so after he arrived in the town, fiddling with some pebbles. He feels a little better; some kind soul gave him some coin that let him shave and bathe and have a hot meal, and he’s managed enough since then; odd bits of begging, some heavy lifting, a couple of bits of transcribing. It’s boring, and he works too quickly for the work to really last, but so far, it’s kept him fed.  
Now though, he’s bored.  
The pebbles are nothing really; sleight of hand was a hobby when he was a boy, before he was a student, before his father sent him off and expected him to look the part. He’s flicking them over knuckles, exchanging them for others kept up his sleeves, trying to keep his hands nimble. Every now and again he’ll add an extra one into the mix, just to keep himself on his toes.  
“Mister,” someone tugs on his sleeve and he loses the rhythm he’d built up, dropping all barring a couple of the pebbles onto the ground. “Show me how you do that?”  
He’s almost got his Gift to his hands to push the irritation away, to gather the pebbles up again, when he remembers that he can’t, so he sighs and looks down. There’s a small girl looking up at him, staring intently at the stones in his hands.  
“You got anymore tricks?” the child asks, smiling.  
He’s about to shoo her away, to go and find her mother when he realises that there are a couple of other children watching, so he smiles, and reaches behind her ear with his empty hand, pulling a pebble from the mass of curls. “Doesn’t your mother make you wash behind your ears?” he asks with a grin.  
The other children laugh while the girl blushes, turning when a woman across the street calls her. She looks back at him and he flips the pebble at her, which she catches in her hands.  
“Work it out for yourself.” He calls as she runs off to her mother, and when he turns back, the other children are still there, watching from a distance. He does a bit of juggling, and a few small tricks that don’t require his Gift, and somehow, much to his confusion, he’s got a pile of coins by his feet after an hour or so.  
His audience is gone, and he looks up and down the street before picking the coins up and slipping them away somewhere safe.

 

“Hey! You can’t do that here!” An angry voice drags him out of his preparations, and he looks up.  
Silas, he’s Silas at the moment, three towns on from where he realised that parlour tricks could earn him money and two towns on from where he’d managed to earn enough to get a new cloak that would last him the winter, as well as food and room and board almost every night (when he remembers to eat and sleep) looks at the man shouting at him, and then down at himself.  
He’s not really doing anything; he’s got a little stool that he borrowed from one of the taverns nearby, and a bit of cloth that he found after market one day to set on the ground, but that’s it really. He’s not got any of his things out yet, so he’s not really sure what he’s being told he can’t do.  
“I’m sorry?” he asks in a more restrained tone, once the man who had been shouting at him gets close enough that he doesn’t have to shout over the noise of the early spring market.  
The man sneers and looks him up and down again. “You can’t just set yourself up as a street entertainer, there’s permissions you need, and what if this is someone’s spot?”  
Silas raises his eyebrow and looks at the man, “It’s my spot.” He tells him, with all the confidence that he used to use when he was convincing tutors or colleagues of something that they had no desire or reason to believe. Somehow though, where it never used to work on them, it works on this scruffy, grumpy looking man.  
It’s only when he looks again at the man’s retreating form that he realises that there’s a slight glow of his Gift, and he swallows, looking around cautiously.  
He screws up a lot that day, and the people who watch spend more time looking sceptical than they do looking entertained, but by the end of the day no one has jumped out of the crowd to try and kill or capture him, and he’s got some, if not a lot of money tucked away.  
Enough to get him out of this town quickly, because winter is coming round again, and he’s realising that Silas needs to vanish from this town, and more importantly, the world.

 

He’s Numair now. It’s been a long time since he was Arram Draper, the name doesn’t fit him anymore. Numair Salmalin. It has the grandiosity that he feels a man of his power should have, and it’s so utterly different, hopefully Ozorne will never connect the two.  
Somehow in the last year and a handful of months, he’s lost count really, he’s circled around Corus. The thought of the city intrigues and terrifies him; a place where, if what he’s heard, there could be something more to life than parlour tricks and cheap entertainment, but where, if he’s not careful, even with a new name Ozorne could easily track him down again.  
He enters the city a few days before midsummer and finds himself a quiet corner of a tavern to hunker down in. His bag has a few books in it along with juggling balls and odd bits and pieces, and for the first few days he just lets himself get the hang of living in a big city again.  
He finds himself somewhere to stay and loses himself. He forgets to eat for a day, just wandering the streets, surrounded by food vendors and markets. He finds that he can actually have conversations, he watches street entertainers and wonders what exactly people see when they watch him. He talks to the local entertainers, he learns their names and what they do, and finds that there’s little in the way of competition between them; the city is so big they don’t need to compete.  
By the end of the week his purse is looking empty, and he finds himself a place to work from, during the days a corner of one of the market areas, and in the evenings by the fire in a tavern a way away from the one that he’s staying at.  
He sets an easy pace for himself, and finds that he ends up with regulars, people who come to watch him day after day, even wealthier looking folk who no doubt have better places to be, or at least better ways to amuse themselves.  
The money he makes is decent, and after a couple of months, realising that he’s got no plans to move on, at least not until after the winter, he finds somewhere more permanent than the tavern to live, and starts filling the place with books and scrolls that he reads when he’s got the time, immersing himself back in the world of magic and academia, even if he’s not willing to risk his Gift, he still wants to know what people are doing, what they’re speculating about.

He slips up one day; too many things in the air, no matter how much the crowd seem to be enjoying it he should know better. His concentration goes and everything goes flying, a couple of bits aiming right for people’s heads, and even after all this time, his first reaction is to grab with his Gift. It flows out like a previously dammed river and for a moment he feels a little faint, then people are clapping and cheering and the easiest thing to do is to sweep down into a bow, not to panic, and let them leave their coins.  
Every time someone comes close to leave some money or to say a few kind words he tenses up, waiting for the inevitable assassination attempt, and he stays like that for the next week or so. Eventually though he starts to relax, Corus is a long way from Carthak, and there’s protection in the fact that Tortall and Carthak have never quite seen eye to eye.  
“You know, a bloke like you could do a lot better than this little corner of the world.” A voice pipes up behind him while he’s fiddling with some coins on the table while he reads.  
One of these days, Numair tells himself, he’s going to stop letting people sneak up on him. Until that day though, he’s just g going to be glad that he’s good at faking expressions. Shock is not a good look on him.  
By the time he looks round, the man speaking has darted round to be in front of him, inviting himself to sit opposite Numair and swipe one of the coins from in front of him.  
Numair scowls. “And what does a man like you think a man like me could be doing?” He asks.  
“All manner of things.” He holds out the coin, just out of Numair’s reach. “Anything he set his mind to, I’m sure, rather than wallowing around here, or any of the other places you’ve been slumming in.”  
Numair reaches for the coin, disinclined to get out of his seat and the man simply leans further away. In a flash of irritation, and emboldened by the fact that it’s been a month since his slip up at the market and still no one has tried to kill him, he reaches out with his Gift for the coin, the other man letting it go immediately, with a broad grin.  
“More like it.” He leans back in the chair and stares at Numair. “There’s plenty of people who could have a use for you,” he stops to take a breath.  
“I’m not in the business of being used, not anymore.” Numair snaps before the man can finish that thought.  
He ducks his head, “My apologies. Poor wording. I mean to say that there are plenty of people who would be willing to work with you, to have your input in projects, to give you a purpose again.”  
Numair pauses before he answers, edgy now. Ozorne has always had spies all over the place, and he’s powerful enough that he could have persuaded seers, if he was really that set on finding where Numair had fled to. “And how would these people know who I am, or that I’m here?”  
The man shrugs. “People talk. People see someone with a powerful Gift and they start speculating, word starts getting around.” He stands up and smoothes his shirt down. “Just think about it.”  
Numair shakes his head and looks back down at the coins. His purse is running lighter than he’d like, and it’s about late enough in the day that he can probably find somewhere in the market to set up.  
Groaning as he stands and works the kinks from his back, he picks up his things and heads out the tavern, into the daylight, and starts to once again ply his trade.  
The man, whoever he was, is briefly in the crowd as Numair entertains them, but he’s gone the next time he looks up.  
His words stick with Numair though, irritating him, and by the end of the month, he’s started to meet people who might actually be good, if not as good as he is, and suddenly Corus seems like it might actually be the place that he was looking for.

**Author's Note:**

> I, this wasn't what I sat down to write. That was full of angst and terror, and then I found I couldn't do that to this character.  
> I also apologise if the timeline is wonky; none of my searching has yielded definite dates, as it were, and repeated rereadings have also been to no avail.  
> That said, thank you, requestee, for asking for this. It made me reread books that I had forgotten quite how much I loved, and made me reconsider a character I'd always been a fond of.


End file.
